Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. This is one of the most important concepts you can apply to your piano practice: you need to think in words. That might sound strange at first. After all, when you’re playing music, especially in performance, you want to let go of verbal thought and just feel the music. You want to be in a state of flow. But when you’re practicing, it’s a different story.

Where Verbal Thinking Matters Most

There is one critical time when using words can make all the difference. That’s the moment between repetitions. After you’ve played something once, before you play it again, you should pause and clearly state what you want to be different. Use real, concrete language. Say it out loud if it helps.

Too often, I see students finish a phrase, realize it didn’t sound quite right, and immediately dive back in. But they haven’t taken the time to figure out what they’re actually trying to improve. They’re just hoping the next try will be better. Do you ever find yourself doing that?

Define What Needs to Change

Let’s say you’ve just played a phrase. The notes were correct, but it sounded flat and lifeless. Before you try again, stop and think: what could make it better? You might say, “I want to add a gentle decrescendo at the end of this phrase.” That gives your next repetition a clear purpose.

Maybe after trying again, you realize it still needs work. Now you might say, “I want the phrase to start softer, build gradually, then fall away at the end.” This is how real musical shaping happens—by clearly defining your goals, one step at a time.

Repeating Without Intention Doesn’t Help

Mindless repetition is one of the biggest mistakes students make. If you play something over and over without deciding what needs to change, you’re often just reinforcing bad habits. Even if it sounds better by chance, how will you know what worked if you weren’t sure what you were aiming for? That’s why thinking in words matters so much. It forces you to practice with intention.

Practice with a Clear Mindset

Whenever you’re practicing to improve something, stop after each attempt and ask yourself: what do I want to change? Be specific. Don’t just say, “I want it to sound better.” Say, “I want a smoother legato,” or “I need to bring out the melody more in the right hand.” This simple habit transforms your practice. It makes every repetition count. You’ll waste less time, and your progress will be much more focused.

Let Yourself Just Play—But Know the Difference

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with just sitting down and playing for enjoyment. I do that too. It’s one of the joys of being a pianist! But when you’re practicing, draw a clear line. Practice is where you stop, reflect, and decide what you want to improve. Let that guide each repetition.

Try this in your next practice session. Pause between attempts, speak your intentions in clear words, and see how much more effective your work becomes. It’s a small change that can lead to big results.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin, and today I’m responding to a great viewer question. Someone asked if I could do an updated explanation of dotted rhythms, specifically using the first bars of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata as an example. They mentioned still struggling to count the dotted rhythms there—and frankly, I understand. You’d be surprised how many performances of the Pathétique have imprecise rhythm at the opening!

How to Count the Rhythm Accurately

The first few measures of the Pathétique Sonata are instantly recognizable, but they require real rhythmic discipline to play correctly. Here’s the trick: you need to understand where the beats fall—and more importantly, where the subdivisions lie. I’ll often count while practicing, just to show the placement. But that’s just a means to an end. What you really need is to internalize the pulse and subdivide accurately.

Let’s say you’re just counting quarter notes—that’s a good start, but it’s not enough. If you rely solely on that, you’ll find it nearly impossible to keep tempo consistent when playing those dotted rhythms. Instead, you must feel both the main beat and the subdivisions—those quicker underlying pulses that help you place notes precisely.

Subdivision: The Key to Rhythmic Accuracy

For example, when you break down that opening rhythm, you’re really working with eighth notes. You need to feel them internally—even if you’re not playing every one. By subdividing, you’re able to execute those dotted rhythms with clarity and confidence. While subdividing the 32nd notes, you keep the larger 8th note beat in mind so your tempo doesn’t drift. That’s the balancing act: subdividing accurately while maintaining the pulse of the larger beats.

Playing Piano Is No Easy Feat!

This is what makes playing the piano so challenging—and so rewarding! You’re juggling multiple layers of awareness all at once. People often ask why the piano is considered so difficult. Well, imagine trying to keep rhythm, phrasing, dynamics, and finger technique all aligned in your two hands—and that’s just one passage!

The Secret? Break It Down

The good news is there’s a method to the madness. Whether you’re working on rhythm, sight-reading, memorization, technique, or theory, the secret is to break everything down into manageable steps. That’s the heart of my teaching: showing how to approach each of these pillars with a structured, clear methodology.

I’m Robert Estrin. Welcome to LivingPianos.com. Legato octaves can be one of the most beautiful expressive tools in piano playing—if you know how to approach them correctly. Today, I want to share a technique that can be a breakthrough for you. I was working with a student on the middle section of Chopin’s Nocturne in B-flat minor. This tip transformed his playing, and I think it could help many of you, too!

The Usual Approach to Legato Octaves

If you’ve worked on legato octaves before, you probably know the general technique: using the fourth and fifth fingers on the top notes, and for those with larger hands, even the third finger at times to maintain legato on the top notes of the right hand (or the bottom notes of the left hand). That’s solid advice—and I’ve covered it in earlier videos. But today, I want to go a step further and share something counterintuitive, yet incredibly effective.

The Real Secret: Abandon Your Thumb!

Don’t try to connect the thumb. In fact, you should purposely disconnect the thumb. Why? Because when you try to connect the thumb from one octave to the next, something strange happens: you end up connecting nothing at all. The thumb is simply not capable of connecting from note to note in this context. It’s physically impossible. Instead, focus entirely on the top note of the octave. That’s where the melody lives. Use your fourth finger on black keys, to get the smooth connection you’re after.

Disconnecting the Thumb Creates Better Sound

There’s another benefit to this approach: it actually sounds better. When you stop trying to connect the thumb, you can shift your weight into your pinky and fourth fingers. That gives the top note of the octave more presence and warmth.

Here’s the comparison:

• With equal weight on both thumb and pinky, the sound tends to flatten out—especially in softer passages.

• With more weight in the pinky and the thumb playing detached, the sound becomes more lyrical and fluid.

Practice Tip: Exaggerate at First

The best way to learn this technique is to practice without the pedal and deliberately detach the thumb. That may feel extreme at first, but it ensures you’re not unintentionally trying to connect the thumb and compromising the top line.

Try this:

Play just the right hand (or whichever hand the octaves are in).

Play the thumb with a gentle staccato.

Focus all your attention on putting weight into your fourth and fifth fingers, particularly in softer passages.

Once that feels natural, you can ease up on how short the thumb plays, but that initial practice will build the foundation.

Isolating the Right Hand

To clarify further, I recommend playing just the right hand (or whichever hand has octaves). You’ll notice how lifting the thumb slightly earlier makes all the difference. It allows you to play beautifully connected top lines in your octaves and avoid tension.

Adding the Pedal Back In

Now that your hand is doing what it should, you can add the pedal. And voilà—you’ll hear a clear, connected top line floating beautifully over the harmony. That’s the power of not trying to do the impossible – not trying to connect the thumb since it is playing all the notes and can’t possibly connect.

So remember:

• Don’t try to connect the thumb in legato octaves—it can’t be done.

• Focus entirely on the top notes, using fourth and possibly third finger where possible.

• Put more weight into the pinky, and back off the thumb, particularly in quiet playing.

• Practice first without the pedal to really hear what’s going on.

• You’ll be amazed at how much smoother and more expressive your octaves become. Try this technique with Chopin’s B-flat minor Nocturne or any piece that calls for legato octaves—and let me know how it goes!

I’m Robert Estrin. Welcome to LivingPianos.com. In this second excerpt from my interview with Zsolt Bognár, I share the journey that led to the creation of Living Pianos—how a lifelong passion for performance, teaching, and technology came together in unexpected ways. If you’d like to hear the full story, be sure to watch the complete interview
here.

Zsolt Bognár:

So I’m curious to break this down in terms of how you perceive your musical balance. Being a pianist, making all these videos, producing and editing them. You teach over 30 students, and you’re selling pianos.

Robert Estrin:

Growing up I always had a lot of interests, but a real passion for music. My father, although he was professor of music at Hofstra University, he did the lion’s share of his teaching in a very large studio in the back of our home, where he had two grand pianos and theory classes and recitals.

“I was intimately involved with my father’s students, and many of them were incredibly accomplished, more so than I was.”

I’ve always had very small hands, and as a kid my hands were very weak and with spaghetti fingers, and even reaching an octave, even at the age of 13, was a struggle. So in terms of, you know, goals, I wasn’t like a child prodigy. But, you know, I always felt music would always be a part of my life. But I didn’t have any specific career ambitions. All I knew was I loved to perform. Performing has always been a passion of mine, and trying to figure out how to incorporate that into a life, into a career, of course, took many decades to figure out one path. And for many, many years,

it always seemed like there was an inverse proportional relationship between what was rewarding financially and what was artistically rewarding.

I started teaching in high school, assisting my father in his teaching, as my sister did before me, and she’s incidentally a pianist and a teacher right here in the Cleveland area, which we can get into as well. But I knew that I did not want to just teach, and yet, when I graduated from conservatory, what was the obvious thing? I had been teaching since high school, and my part-time job through college was teaching and accompanying. So that’s how I made my living initially. But I had so many other interests.

So I expanded into a recording studio, which I put in my lower level of my home, and I did music production and composing for film and video, and I just always was expanding and expanding and expanding for a long, long time. But it wasn’t ultimately gratifying.

“I tried to figure out what I could possibly do in order to further my performing, and that’s when I came up with Living Piano.”

I go from three distinct periods: the ultimate harpsichord, the earliest piano that really was catching on, and then the modern piano. And I performed that dozens of times all over the state of California. And that was a way that I was able to promote my performing while bringing something that’s more than just another concert. It’s something you could talk about. And I got written up in papers and blogs because it was something fresh and new in music and with the piano, which is really a challenge. And that’s really when I turned the corner.

“I actually started making piano videos in the late 90s.”

A company in Irvine called Digevent engaged me along with a guitar and drum show for Keyboard Kaleidoscope, and I did 50 shows. They were one-hour live internet shows, cutting edge for the time, that I did for a year every week. I did many different topics. And yet they didn’t take off. They ended up getting sold to another company, and they never could get traction with these live events. They engaged us to do these shows, but it was a pitifully small audience, and I think it was because most people didn’t have the high-speed internet to be able to enjoy it and to partake in such a thing. But by the early 2000s the internet was working for people, and broadband was now becoming more ubiquitous.

“I always loved to make videos anyway. So I just started making them, and I kind of went all in on it.”

First, I engaged a young man who was a friend of my daughter’s who had just graduated from film school—Chapman University—and he wanted to do a showcase of his talent. So he made a documentary of my Living Piano: Journey Through Time Historic Concert Experience. And from there, little by little, he started doing more and more for me with my website until he ended up being full-time.

“Living Piano, the show, grew into Living Pianos because I had always been selling pianos, from the time I graduated from conservatory, because of teaching.”

Students would call me for lessons, and the first question I’d ask is, “Do you have a piano?” And half the time they would say no. And I would tell them, honestly, you’re better off with a piano and no lessons than lessons and no piano. So that’s when I started, looking for pianos I could have refurbished and sell, and there was such a big demand for this that I just always had extra pianos in my home. We ended up with this big live-work loft with, dozens of pianos. And so that always grew.